The Esquire 21: Julie Taymor

Act of Genius: Dream Sequences

THERE'S NO WORD FOR WHAT SHE IS. ARTIST? PLEASE. IT NEEDS another, rounder vowel, and maybe an n and an x. Besides, that word has lost its imaginative power. And that is what Julie Taymor has: deep, crazy, startling imaginative power. There are other words--designer, director, puppeteer, costume maker, sculptor, filmmaker--but they are the language of tradecraft and they are not what she is. Silk tears falling from wooden eyes.Boys with long white beards suspended from kites. Those are what she is. You know Taymor, forty-six, as the director of the astonishing Broadway (and now London) version of The Lion King. But she was whatever the right word is long before that. There's the g word, of course. Or try this, from Charles Helm, of the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, which is staging an exhibition of her work this fall: "The great Renaissance man of the end of the millennium is a woman named Julie Taymor."

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She is now doing for Shakespeare on film what she did for animation on stage. Her movie Titus, starring Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange, opens this winter. It is not like anything you have seen. And because description of any Taymor work is inadequate, we asked her to show us something (right). And to write about it:

"Rome is but a wilderness of tigers," Shakespeare wrote in his brilliant early drama Titus Andronicus, which is rife with plant and animal metaphors for human corporeality, personality, and states of mind. I was challenged as a film director to reach for a heightened equivalent of these surreal and often violent visions of the human/animal dichotomy. So I created a gallery of "Penny Arcade Nightmares," which invade the film in moments of intense inner turmoil.

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Lavinia, Titus's daughter, appears as a doe besieged by tigers in a flashback of her rape. In another nightmare, Titus envisions an angel with iron wings heralding the appearance of his murdered son as half human, half sacrificial lamb. In a third, the enemy queen Tamora and her two sons arrive as Rape, Revenge, and Murder incarnate. The owl signifies Rape, a crown of kitchen knives adorns the batlike goddess Revenge, and the tiger man is Murder. --JULIE TAYMOR